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12 thoughts on “It’s Canada. Who cares?”

Hey – if you had to take into consideration the dollars and cents of it, and you had to take into consideration the amount of news coming out of Canada that Americans have even a modicum of interest in…

Maybe we should set up an office designated to lure them here and offer up lots of tax credits. Their news would be reported from here, but they could still pretend it was Philadelphia or Prague or whatever.

I see your point, but I think there are a few other factors:
1-None of the US bureaus of any of the organizations you mention are within spitting distance of Colombia, the way they are with Canada. If news breaks in a major city in Canada, reporters from any city in the Northeast as well as from Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, etc. can potentially be there within a few hours or so.

2-Kind of related, but South America is a big place with way more people than we have here. And way more governments too. Reporters in Bogota are certainly not covering only stories within Colombia.

I assume that they must run Canada stories out of the US newsrooms, no? Same language, similar culture, etc. Not true of Mexico. If you search NYT for stories on canada, it does seem like they have a specialist, Ian Austen, whose stories are a digest of some of the goings on up here (bill C-10, the convict in Mexico who got flown back to Canada, etc). Doing a search for “canada” on Washington Post, however, is a different story. I guess every time they mention the Blackberry, they have to also mention Canada…

I’m with Josh on this. On one hand we have the savings of shipping a reporter up ad hoc. On the other hand, to take the example of Mexico, well, it’s a nation of 109 million people. Mexico City’s metropolitan area is only slightly less inhabited than the entire expanse of Quebec and Ontario, from the Baie des chaleurs to the Lake of the Woods and from the banks of Lake Erie to permafrozen shores of Ungava. The economics speak for themselves.

Skimming the list of nations where the WP has its foreign bureaux, I think only Lebanon has a population smaller than Canada’s, though I think we can agree that that part of the world has a higher GNP (Gross News Product) per capita than most. NYT? I’m sure the Dakar bureau reports on more than just Senegalese events of world import.

But now what if we turn this question on its head: what about Canadian foreign bureaux? I remember reading in Les Français aussi ont un accent (an excellent gift for that opinionated French ex-pat you want to put in his/her place) that no major French-language Canadian newspaper has a bureau outside of Québec, let alone abroad. Is this still the case? The CBC made a push to open more foreign bureaux a few years back, if I recall, but what of anglo-Canadian newspapers? Anything aside New York, Washington and maybe London?